Aleksandar Vučić acknowledged defeat in the 25 October parliamentary elections in Serbia, saying he expects the Student List to win a majority in the new parliament.
According to preliminary CRTA estimates, the Student List leads with 51.47 percent of the vote, compared with 40.42 percent for the “Aleksandar Vučić – Serbia Strong” list. These are not official final results.
The Student List emerged from the student protest movement against corruption, which began after the collapse of the railway station canopy in Novi Sad in 2024, in which 16 people lost their lives. It has no single leader: students organize through plenums, where decisions are made collectively, and for the elections they backed a list of candidates from various fields.
During the campaign, the Student List’s candidates spoke in favor of reviewing all agreements reached in the dialogue on normalizing relations with Kosovo, returning the issue of Kosovo’s status to the United Nations, and making decisions only after consultation with the Serbs of Kosovo.
It remains to be seen whether they will stand by these positions after the elections.
In public statements in Serbia, which Radio Free Europe analyzed before Sunday’s elections, the common position of this political movement, which emerged from the student protests against corruption, is: “Kosovo is an integral part of Serbia, as written in the country’s Constitution.”
Representatives of this movement symbolically carried Serbia’s Constitution with them during the campaign, with the message that they would defend it and act only in accordance with it.
Official Belgrade does not recognize Kosovo as an independent state, but negotiations on normalizing relations, mediated by the European Union, have been held since 2011. Dozens of agreements have been reached within this framework, which many political analysts say amount to a “de facto” recognition of Kosovo’s independence.
One of the most recent agreements, accepted at the political level by Albin Kurti and Aleksandar Vučić, is the Agreement on the Path to Normalization of Relations between Kosovo and Serbia, also known as the Basic Agreement, reached on 27 February 2023 in Brussels, following a Franco-German proposal. It provides for respect of territorial integrity and Serbia’s commitment not to oppose Kosovo’s membership in any international organization. The annex for its implementation was agreed on 18 March 2023 in Ohrid and is known as the Ohrid Annex.
Kosovo, for its part, accepted the obligation to guarantee the Serbs of Kosovo a certain level of self-management, namely to establish the Association of Serb-Majority Municipalities.
What now?
Kosovo’s Prime Minister, Albin Kurti, is conditioning the continuation of high-level political dialogue on the extradition from Serbia of Milan Radoičić, who took responsibility for the armed attack in Banjska.
The Student List, which may determine Serbia’s state policy over the next four years, has so far not expressed a clear position on this issue.
The criticism has been directed mainly at the Serb List, the main party of Serbs in Kosovo, formed with the support of the Serbian Progressive Party and Aleksandar Vučić. Until the attack in Banjska, Milan Radoičić was vice-president of this party.
Nevertheless, Vučić’s departure from power and the rise to power of the Student List could bring changes in the way Belgrade exercises political influence over Kosovo Serbs, especially through the Serb List. Serbia’s influence, however, goes beyond the party: for thousands of Kosovo Serbs, institutions financed by Belgrade are a source of jobs, salaries, pensions and social assistance. Education and healthcare continue to operate with funding from Serbia and employ thousands of members of the Serb community.
The Student List also included four representatives of the University in North Mitrovica, which operates within Serbia’s system. Among them was Jugoslav Gashić, an assistant professor at the Faculty of Medicine, who told the Belgrade newspaper “Danas” about the possible integration of educational and healthcare institutions operating within Serbia’s system in Serb-populated areas of Kosovo.
“If [integration] is only registration in the so-called Kosovo system, it is acceptable to me, but integration as Kosovarization is absolutely unacceptable,” he said.
Kosovo raised this issue in September of last year, arguing that the dual system is unsustainable, while the international community insists that any eventual integration should be carried out in consultation with the Serb community. The international community had also earlier criticized Kosovo’s actions to close Serbian institutions without providing alternative ways of delivering services to citizens.
Marko Savković assesses that the political infrastructure built during Vučić’s rule would be called into question with his departure.
“That infrastructure would face crises that it would find very difficult to overcome: a financing crisis, a leadership crisis and an identity crisis,” Savković, an associate of the Belgrade Centre for International and Security Affairs, had said in early October on the Expose program of Radio Free Europe.
This does not mean that Serbia would stop supporting Kosovo Serbs, but it raises the question of what form that support would take and how much it would remain linked to political control from Belgrade.
For Sonja Biserko of the Helsinki Committee for Human Rights, a change of government may create room for a different approach.
“For Kosovo Serbs, it would be important for a new government in Serbia to have a realistic approach toward them, to help strengthen their position in Kosovo and to orient them toward dialogue with Pristina. That would be the best solution for them,” Biserko said on the Expose program of Radio Free Europe.
Meanwhile, in a debate on Serbia’s public broadcaster, Jugoslav Gashić said that if the Student List comes to power, it will insist that all agreements signed with Kosovo be subject to parliamentary procedure and review by the Constitutional Court, with the possibility of revising them.
It is not yet clear whether this would mean an attempt to legally challenge previously undertaken obligations, to revise them politically, or to change the way Belgrade implements them.
Political scientists who follow relations between Kosovo and Serbia, Ognjen Gogić and Aleksandar Šljuka, have previously assessed for REL that future authorities in Serbia will not be able to withdraw from the dialogue, because such a move would risk relations with the European Union.
The Memorandum for Kosovo
In mid-year, at one of its rallies, the Student List also published the Memorandum for Kosovo, in which Kosovo is treated as “an inalienable and constituent part of the Republic of Serbia”.
A part of public opinion in Serbia criticized the text of the memorandum, arguing that the Serbian Progressive Party cannot be defeated with nationalist policies. The Memorandum for Kosovo contains four points.
One of them states that the Kosovo issue “cannot be resolved in isolation, but only within the complex developments of the international community” and that authorities in Serbia must “actively and constructively cooperate with all relevant international organizations” to find a sustainable solution “within the framework of their Constitution”.
At the end of September, the students also published an episode of their election campaign titled “The Betrayal of Kosovo”.
Their criticism of Vučić is not that Serbia should recognize Kosovo. They criticize him for developments that occurred during his rule: from the removal of license plates and the Serbian dinar in Kosovo to the closure by Kosovo authorities of institutions that functioned according to Serbia’s system.
However, the position of all governments since the fall of Slobodan Milošević’s regime, that Kosovo is part of Serbia, is also shared by a majority of Serbian citizens. According to a 2023 survey by the Institute for European Affairs, more than 50 percent of citizens expressed opposition to Kosovo’s independence.
Since opposition to Kosovo’s statehood did not begin with Vučić, according to Marko Savković, and is unlikely to end with him.
Savković told Radio Free Europe that the political space in Serbia for a fundamentally different approach to Kosovo’s status remains very limited.
“When it comes to opposing Kosovo’s statehood itself as a concept, this is certainly state policy, and some continuity can be expected here, whoever is in power in Serbia. Political options that accept the de facto situation, because Kosovo de facto is a state, are few and are on the political margins”, Savković says for Radio Free Europe’s Expose program.
Sonja Biserko does not expect the approach to Kosovo’s status to change quickly even if another government comes to power in Belgrade.
“It is certain that in various crisis situations, everyone will try to use Kosovo for emotional mobilization, to gather people around themselves. I think that, at its core, there will be no changes regarding Kosovo’s status. This is ruled out”, Biserko says for Expose./REL/